The biggest audience participation show on TV, American Idol, will soon allow viewers to vote for their favorite singers via Facebook. Entertainment Weekly reports that viewers will be able to navigate to a voting page on Facebook, which presumably would let you share your votes with your friends.
At the same time, Simon Cowell’s new singing competition show, X-Factor, will also allow Facebook voting, reports People.com. In both cases, viewers will still be able to vote with their phones, which has been a huge source of revenue for American Idol.
It’s amazing that it’s taken this long for Idol to add online voting, and doing it through Facebook makes tremendous sense. The act of voting becomes an act of social promotion, which the show needs now more than ever as viewership slides and a big new competitor, X-Factor, comes on the scene. And increasingly, established social platforms are becoming the backbone of a new approach to interactive TV.
So far, there’s no word of Twitter’s involvement with either show, which would also make a lot of sense. Viewers could tweet hashtags, for example, to vote for contestants.
